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Brands as Publishers

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Marketers now produce a continual stream of content just to keep up with user demand. This requires a shift to the publishing model, which calls for new strategies, people, and processes.

In today’s “always-on” world, consumers have an insatiable appetite for content. They’re watching videos, reading articles, searching for product information, sharing posts on social media, and asking questions in user forums. This is creating a new content paradigm: brand as publisher.

“Consumers now have many more places to access on-demand content across paid, owned, and earned channels,” says Alan Schulman, national director of brand creative & content marketing at Deloitte Digital. “Marketers recognize that this creates a demand for much more content, so they are beginning to behave more like publishers, which is a pretty big shift.”

In the past, marketers relied heavily on agencies to create content—primarily ad campaigns. “Digital content was used to create a halo over the TV buy,” Schulman says. “Banner ads led up to the campaign, YouTube videos and other digital media ran heavily during the campaign, and promotions ran on the back end. Advertisers would go dark between campaigns, which is not a way to win with consumers. The new model goes well beyond the campaign.”

To make the shift to a publishing model, marketers can consider four core areas: strategy, organization, governance, and measurement.

Strategy: Aligning to the “North Star”

Perhaps the most important consideration for brands is a solid content strategy. “Everything has to align to the brand purpose,” Schulman says. “The best content is relevant, inspiring, understandable, and leads to the company’s North Star.”

In contrast to the campaign model of the past, the publishing model of today involves producing content that’s not about the company or the brand but about customers and their needs. This means focusing on customer stories—how customers are using products and services in inspiring ways, Schulman says. To build a reputation for thought leadership, marketers can also develop three to four “content pillars” that align to their brand purpose.

Schulman says General Electric (GE) is a good example of a company that is succeeding with this model. “With its ‘Imagination at Work’ platform,” says Schulman, “GE is publishing content around different pillars for its different business units—healthcare, energy, aviation, etc.—and it also has a holistic macro view. Everything is aligned to the brand purpose, even though the company is telling stories through a mix of videos, data visualization, social media, infographics, and so forth.”

A clear content strategy is essential for marketing leaders to enlist support across the organization and garner executive buy-in.

Organization: The Magazine Model

One of the biggest challenges for brands is reorganizing for content production. “Brands are beginning to operate more like magazines, and this requires a new structure,” Schulman says.

The first step is putting the right people in place. “Brands need a chief content officer or a managing editor to take a macro view and lead editorial direction,” he says. They also need writers to produce the content. Schulman identifies three types of writers for this work: conceptual copywriters, who can create big, campaign-type ideas; journalistic, expository writers, who can write longer-form stories that explain complex ideas in understandable language; and writers oriented to pop culture, who are responsible for social posts and “snackable” content.

Collaboration among team members is also essential. “Brands will often create a content studio that enables teams to interact closely,” Schulman says. “In this newsroom-like setup, the social team can be near the web team, the blog team, the email team, and so forth.” Having remote writers can also be effective, as long as the teams can readily communicate through email, phone, and online collaboration tools.

Another important organizational issue is whether editorial teams should be centralized or aligned with business units. “It is different with every company,” Schulman says. Many B2B companies have a centralized content group that serves multiple business units, while many consumer packaged goods companies rely on agency partners for campaign content and in-house teams for owned and earned content, he notes. “The model we’ve seen work most effectively is when each business unit or brand team has a content marketing lead who participates in an enterprise-level content marketing committee or council that is run by the corporate chief content officer,” he adds.

Governance: Putting Processes in Place

Another consideration is governance—establishing the framework and processes for content production. “It is important for brands to address issues such as what stories will be published and at what cadence, how often teams should meet, and how the editorial team will interact with other departments,” Schulman says. He recommends the following processes for editorial teams:

Create an editorial calendar that defines what content will be published on a weekly, monthly, quarterly, or yearly basis.

Develop a mix of content that both informs and inspires. This can include Q&As with company executives, customer case studies, video interviews, research reports, white papers, and social posts.

Collaborate with other departments, such as product development and customer service, to tie story ideas into new product launches, customer issues, etc.

Take a measured approach, perhaps starting with two to three pieces of original content a week and then working up to five or seven pieces per week.

Partner with media companies, research firms, and others to develop joint content.

Measuring the success of content initiatives is important for gaining executive buy-in, but it also represents a challenge for brands because of a lack of consensus about which metrics to track. Some common metrics for measuring content effectiveness include page views, website visitors, subscribers, and “likes” on social networks, although marketers are now beginning to use more sophisticated metrics for brand, engagement, advocacy, sales, and e-commerce. Some of these metrics include lead quantity, lead quality, and time spent engaging with content.

The CMO can play an important role by establishing qualitative and quantitative metrics and determining content marketing KPIs that represent a holistic view of the customer’s experience.

Regardless of the industries they serve, brands are recognizing the need to act more like publishers, Schulman says. “It may be daunting to some marketers, but putting interesting and inspiring content out there will be a requirement for keeping a brand top of mind.”

Brands as Publishers

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